Restitution Before Reconciliation / Wole Soyinka is not ready to forgive those who plundered and dominated Africa

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, January 31, 1999

By
Wole Soyinka
Oxford
University
; 208 pages; $23
The Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian author Wole Soyinka is famous for his dismissal of the anti-colonial literary ideology of "Negritude" with the words: "A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude; he pounces." Although Soyinka has modified aspects of his criticism, the initial condemnation stuck, and his statement has since assumed the immortality of a dictum.

With the publication of his latest book, "The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness," Soyinka's assessment can now be fully appreciated. The text of the book was given as lectures at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University in 1997 -- hence the tone, which oscillates between the factuality of journalism and the discursiveness of scholarly writing.

A typical Soyinka essay, "The Burden of Memory" is robust with extensive allusions to politics, religion, history and, of course, literature. It is an inquiry into the realm of culture, a challenge to a world faced with the larger question of giving politics a moral basis. Soyinka's quest in the book is for true restitution for all the moral and material wrongs done to Africa, whether through slavery or colonialism, whether by the West or the East.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in democratic South Africa to examine the injustices of apartheid, served as a launching pad for Soyinka's critique of what he believes to be a flawed notion of justice. The commission was designed to get those suspected of human rights violations under apartheid to come forward and own up. It was enough, according to the rationale of the commission headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, that the offenders confess their crimes.

But Soyinka asks for more, because where there is a predetermined exclusion of restitution, "there remains a sense that the adopted formula for the harmonization of that society erodes, in some way, one of the pillars on which a durable society must be founded -- Responsibility." If it is unjust to condemn a suspect before proof, it's equally unjust to absolve a suspect before proof.

Soyinka wonders whether this is a morality that flows from the Christian ethic of turning the other cheek, and it seems more than coincidental that the commission's chairman is an Anglican bishop. Far from doubting Tutu's personal integrity, Soyinka identifies with his status as an anti- apartheid activist who earned a Nobel Peace Prize. (Only last Thanksgiving, both men co- signed a letter to Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania championing the cause of Mumia Abu-Jamal.) But instead of "truth and reconciliation," Soyinka argues for "truth, reparations and reconciliation."

One lecture included here, "L.S. Senghor and Negritude," draws a parallel between the morality of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the former president of Senegal's brand of Negritude. Senghor was, with the Martinican poet Aime Cesaire and the Haitian Leon Damas, in the vanguard of that much-vilified cultural movement. Negritude was meant to be an anchor of cultural identity for people of African descent in their battle against the residual effects of slavery and colonialism; in its contradictions, it slipped easily into superficiality and racial self-romanticization.

Senghor, a product of the French colonial policy of assimilation, was so enamored of France that he absolved the French of any wrongdoing. This absolution of France, writes Soyinka, "does not proceed from the history of the behavior or character of the excepted race -- France, it would appear, is exceptionally blessed simply from the privilege of being itself!" Soyinka brings to the reader's attention a confession by Senghor that he had dreamed as a child of following the priestly vocation; in him, Archbishop Tutu certainly has a fellow traveler.

It is a fitting irony that Christianity was effectively used in the imperial suppression of indigenous cultures. Although Soyinka does not make the point very explicitly, he justifies his rejection of unconditional forgiveness with recourse instead to the Yoruba religious worldview. The case in favor of material reparations for the injustices of slavery has a luminous moral: Restitution should naturally follow the establishment of guilt. Then, reconciliation.